The Faith Instinct (2 page)

The purpose of this book is to try to understand religious behavior from an evolutionary perspective. Some of the implications that emerge from this approach may be unwelcome to believers, others to atheists. People of faith may not warm to the view that the mind’s receptivity to religion has been shaped by evolution. Those who regard religion as an obscurantist obstacle to rational progress may not embrace the idea that religious behavior evolved because it conferred essential benefits on ancient societies and their successors.

Despite these understandable attitudes, the evolutionary approach to religion does not necessarily threaten the central positions of either believers or atheists. Believers would be right to take the view that Darwin’s theory specifies no purpose for the biological process it explains and cannot trespass into whatever religions have to say about the meaning of life. Evolution describes how the human body and behavior have been shaped, but has nothing to say about any ultimate purpose behind this process. Biological drives for all functions essential to survival are embedded in the human brain; it need surely be no scandal to people of faith that an instinct for religious behavior is one of those necessities. That the mind has been prepared by evolution to believe in gods neither proves nor disproves their existence.

Atheists, for their part, may not at all welcome the idea that religious behavior strengthens the moral fabric, enhances social cohesion and was so central to the survival of early human societies that all that lacked it have perished. But even that perspective does not compel them to acknowledge the hand of a deity in shaping human values. Religious behavior can be studied for its own sake, regardless of whether or not a deity exists.

 

 

THE THEME OF THE pages ahead is that an instinct for religious behavior is indeed an evolved part of human nature. Because of the decided survival advantage conferred on people who practiced a religion, the behavior had become written into our neural circuitry by at least 50,000 years ago, and probably much earlier.

To see why religion is likely to be an evolved behavior, it helps to compare it with language. Like language, religion is a complex cultural behavior built on top of a genetically shaped learning machinery. Peo
ple are born with innate instincts for learning the language and the religion of their community. But in both cases culture supplies the content of what is learned. That is why languages and religions differ so widely from one society to the next, while remaining so similar in their basic form.

Just as language operates on top of many other behaviors that had evolved earlier, such as neural systems for hearing and generating sounds, religious behavior too depends on several other sophisticated faculties, such as sensitivity to music, the moral instinct and of course language itself. Like language, religious behavior in all societies develops at a specific age, as if an innate learning program is being triggered on cue.

As with language, religion is most significant as a social behavior. One can speak or pray to oneself, but both are most meaningful when done in company. That is because both faculties are instruments of communication.

Many human behaviors are shared with other animals, especially our fellow mammals, leaving little room for doubt that traits like a mother’s urge to protect her children have a strong genetic basis. And it is easy to envisage that mothers who watch closely over their young will leave more surviving offspring than will less vigilant mothers. So over the course of a few generations genes that promote protective instincts will displace genes allowing maternal indifference, and the upshot will be development of a strong instinct for maternal care.

The same argument applies to the development of language and religion, though is less demonstrably true because they are uniquely human behaviors and there are no other species in which these faculties can be directly studied. Still, it has long seemed likely on grounds of general plausibility that language has a genetic basis. The rules of sentence formation are so complex that babies must presumably possess an innate syntax-generating machinery, rather than having to figure out the rules for themselves. The existence of such a neural mechanism would explain why infants learn to speak so effortlessly, and at a specific age, as if some neural developmental program is being rolled out at that time. Evolution has not yet had time to engineer similar programs for reading and writing, which is why they must be taught so laboriously in school.

Arguments about the innateness or otherwise of language have been hard to resolve because so little is known about the genes that define the architecture of the human brain. But with recent advances in decoding the human genome, the first genes affecting language have started to come to light, beginning with the discovery in 2001 of the FOXP2 gene which affects several neural and muscular skills underlying the articulacy of speech.

People survive as social groups, not as individuals, and little is more critical to a social species than its members’ ability to communicate with one another. Because of the primacy of language the effectiveness of the other modes of communication, such as religion or gesture, often goes unappreciated. Just as language is a system for communicating
thought, religious behavior is a way of signaling shared values and emotions. Any genetic variation that made these systems more effective is likely to have been quickly favored by natural selection. This is particularly true if natural selection operates on groups of individuals as well as at the level of individuals alone, as is more usual. Group level selection is controversial among evolutionary biologists, but even its sternest opponents do not say that it cannot exist, only that it is likely to be insignificant in most cases. There are special circumstances in human evolution, discussed below, that would have allowed group selection to operate much more powerfully than usual.

It’s easy enough to see why natural selection would have favored genes underlying the faculty of language, given the immense advantage to members of a social species of being able to share thoughts and information. But why should religious behavior have evolved? What benefit does religion confer, other than spiritual fulfillment? How can religious behavior make a difference on the only scale measured by natural selection, that of leaving more progeny?

To understand the influence exerted by religion in early societies, it helps to distinguish between its personal aspects, which are probably more familiar to people today, and its role as a social force.

Asked to define religion, many people will describe the personal importance of their belief, whether as a feeling of communion with the sacred, a source of hope and solace, a compass of moral behavior, an explanation of misfortune, or a wellspring of meaning in life. In his book
The Varieties of Religious Experience,
the psychologist William James emphasized the personal above any other element of religion. Religion, as he defined it, “shall mean for us the feelings, acts, and experiences of individual men in their solitude, so far as they apprehend themselves to stand in relation to whatever they may consider the divine. Since the relation may be either moral, physical, or ritual, it is evident that out of religion in the sense in which we take it, theologies, philosophies, and ecclesiastical organizations may secondarily grow.”
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But however strongly religion may seem to grow out of people’s personal beliefs, the practice of religion is heavily social. It is because of their personal beliefs that people desire to worship together with others of the same faith. People may pray alone, but religious services and rituals are communal. A religion belongs to a community and shapes members’ social behavior, both toward one another (the in-group) and toward non-believers (the out-group). The social aspect of religion is extraordinarily significa
nt because the rules for behavior toward others are in effect a society’s morality.

One need look no further for a reason why people are so attached to their religion. The quality of a society—its cohesiveness, its freedom from crime, its members’ willingness to help others, the rarity of lying, cheating and freeloading—is shaped by the nature of its morality and by the strength of people’s adherence to community standards. Both of these—standards of morality, and the extent of compliance with them—are set or heavily influenced by religion. People will defend their religion because it undergirds so much else of what gives life quality.

Those standards of morality underwritten by religion have a curious feature about them, one that is not generally acknowledged by moral philosophers who see morality as being based on universal principles. Practical morality is not universal. Compassion and forgiveness are the behaviors owed to one’s in-group, but not necessarily to an out-group, and certainly not to an enemy.

Toward hostile societies human behavior is steely, implacable and often genocidal. Foes may be demonized or regarded as subhuman, and the moral restraints owed to members of one’s own society need not be extended to them. And religion is often intimately involved in warfare because it is invoked by leaders to justify aggression, to sustain morale, and to spur soldiers to the ultimate sacrifice.

From this perspective, one can begin to see how crucial religion may have been over the centuries in ensuring a society’s survival. It enhances the quality of a society and makes it worth fighting for, and it inspires people to lay down their lives in the society’s defense. Other things being equal, groups with a stronger religious inclination would have been more united and at a considerable advantage compared with groups that were less cohesive. People in the more successful groups would have left more surviving children, and genes favoring an instinct for religious behavior would have become commoner each generation until they had swept through the entire human population.

The social function of religion, as opposed to the personal, is the one that seemed significant to Émile Durkheim, a founder of sociology. Durkheim saw religion as playing a mediating role between people and the society in which they live. “The faithful are not mistaken when they believe in the existence of a moral power to which they are subject and from which they receive what is best in themselves. That power exists, and it is society,” Durkheim wrote in his book
The Elementary Forms of Religious Life,
first published in 1912. He went on to note that “religion is first and foremost a system of ideas by means of which individuals imagine the society of which they are members and the obscure yet intimate relations they have with it.”
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People do not of course worship society directly. Durkheim’s insight was that the relationship between religion and society could be seen to work in two directions, at least in terms of their functions. Religion imbues a societ
y with moral standards and belief in a supernatural enforcer behind them; society embraces religion and follows its dictates, while shaping them toward solving current problems. Religion is far more than belief in supernatural powers, in Durkheim’s view. Magicians and sorcerers, after all, summon unearthly forces to do their bidding, but they do not draw people to one another—there is no church of magic. Religious beliefs, on the other hand, are shared, and bind together all those who hold them.

This line of thought led Durkheim to his well-known definition:
“A religion is a unified system of beliefs and practices relative to sacred things, that is to say, things set apart and forbidden—beliefs and practices which unite into one single moral community called a Church all those who adhere to them.”
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In showing that religion and church are inseparable, Durkheim added, the definition underlines that religion “must be an eminently collective thing.”

For those familiar with thinking of religion in personal terms, it may seem strange to conceive of religion as an agent of society’s collective will, in addition to whatever else it may be. But consider how intimately religion is involved in important social functions, such as the rite of marriage. In the Anglican branch of Christianity, toward the conclusion of the service, the priest joins together the right hands of the man and woman, and issues the solemn warning, “Those whom God hath joined together, let no man put asunder.”

These are powerful words because at that moment, in their own eyes and in those of society, the man and woman indeed become married, and their union is spiritually indissoluble. The arrangement is one that all in the community recognize, whether they were present or not. “There are hardly any words in the Prayer Book which more solemnly declare the faithful conviction of the Church that God ratifies the work of His priests,” writes John Henry Blunt, author of
The Annotated Book of Common Prayer.
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And of course society too, through the priest’s words and the communal service, ratifies the marriage.

There may be a civil procedure as well, but it does not carry the same weight. It is the religious ceremony that evokes the emotional conviction that two people have been truly married.

In the initiation rites observed by many peoples, which commonly occur as part of a religious ceremony, a boy becomes a man, not just metaphorically but because his community thereafter treats him like a man. In coronation rites, whether by anointment or the placement of a crown or diadem on his head, a man becomes a king. Religions are powerful creators of social fact. And it’s not merely facts they create, but a binding emotional knowledge that these facts are sacred truths.

It’s easy to underestimate the remarkable nature of the effect achieved by religious belief, just as it is easy to underestimate language, since we take both faculties for granted. Language lets people convey precise thoughts from the mind of one individual to that of another, an extraor
dinary feat of biological engineering achieved by no other living species. Equally unparalleled, religion binds a group of individuals together in beliefs and principles they consider so sacred and inviolable that they feel compelled to submit their usually lively sense of self-interest to that of the group. Just as language achieves almost perfect communication, religion brings about an emotional commitment so powerful that people will make almost any sacrifice that their religion requires, including that of their life.